Sacramento McDonald’s Tries to Drive Homeless Away with Siren
September 22nd, 2019Via: CBS Sacramento:
A Sacramento McDonald’s is going to extremes to curb outside loitering. It’s playing a loud, strange sound on speakers outside the restaurant.
The property at 30th and K streets appears to be a popular homeless hangout site.
The siren is intended to annoy and reduce the number of people standing around the outside entrance, but some people aren’t going anywhere.
According to the city, the sound levels are legal.
The effort to clear out homeless loitering could backfire. Some McDonald’s customers tell us they’ll just eat a much quieter location.
The Time When A Burning B-52 Nearly Caused A Nuclear Catastrophe “Worse than Chernobyl”
September 22nd, 2019Via: The Drive:
Nearly four decades ago, a U.S. Air Force B-52H bomber, armed with eight nuclear-tipped AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missiles and four B28 nuclear gravity bombs, burned for hours at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. Years later, despite previous assurances that the risk of a nuclear accident had been low, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a key U.S. nuclear weapons research and development facility, testified that the incident had actually come very close to being “worse than Chernobyl.”
Mystery Towers Going Up All Over Cincinnati Area
September 22nd, 2019These towers are going up and the cities don’t know which companies are building them? This is incredible.
Via: WCPO:
But the FCC allows these towers to go in with almost no local approval. The FCC and FAA claim there are no proven links between 5G cell service and health effects, and say local residents have no reason to fear these new towers.
But Hamilton County Engineer Ted Hubbard told us a few months ago that even he, and other county officials are left in the dark.
“The ownership is a big question,” Hubbard said. “And I have asked that. We are having a hard time finding out who actually owns it.”
That means no one has publicly stated who owns the mysterious Cleves tower, or any of the others popping up across the Tri State. It has no company name on the base.
A Verizon corporate spokesman, David Weissmann, confirmed to WCPO that the company is installing 5G towers in the Cincinnati area — as he says one of the 30 cities that will soon have Verizon 5G service.
However, he said the strange Cleves tower “is not Verizon equipment.”
Epstein’s Process: When You Are In, You Can’t Get Out
September 22nd, 2019Via: Miami Herald:
“He would find out they have no home, no car, that they need a place to live, and he would provide a place to live,’’ Edwards said. “He can get you to the best doctors. Sometimes he would do that and sometimes he wouldn’t do that, but the promise was real because as soon as you walk into his house and see there are legitimate cooks, chefs, and assistants, everybody catering to him — it gives this air of legitimacy. I mean, everybody in this whole entire mansion can’t possibly be running an illegal sex trafficking operation, right?”
…
“There were doctors and psychiatrists and gynecologist visits. There were dentists who whitened our teeth. There was a doctor who gave me Xanax. What doctor in their right mind, who is supposed to protect their patients, gives girls and young women Xanax?’’ Giuffre said.
Ransome said at one point when she was on the verge of a breakdown Epstein sent her to a psychiatrist to whom she confided about the abuse. He did nothing except put her on lithium.
“I find it so funny with all these people, after Jeffrey was arrested, saying ‘we didn’t know — we didn’t see anything,’ ” Ransome said.
“Robot Priests Can Bless You, Advise You, and Even Perform Your Funeral”
September 22nd, 2019You head on down to your local Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, hoping for a pleasant sermon from a robot that looks like it stepped out of Ghost in the Shell, but you find that there have been…
Upgrades.
Here’s Geordie Rose talking about, “These things that we’re summoning into the world now.”
Via: Vox:
A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.
Mindar is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.
For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.
“This robot will never die; it will just keep updating itself and evolving,” said Tensho Goto, the temple’s chief steward. “With AI, we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It’s changing Buddhism.”
Google Research Paper Claims ‘Quantum Supremacy’
September 21st, 2019The paper was posted publicly by mistake and then removed.
Via: Fortune:
In what may be a huge milestone in computing, Google says it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” an experimental demonstration of the superiority of a quantum computer over a traditional one.
The claim, made in a new scientific paper, is the most serious indication yet that the promise of quantum computers—an emerging but unproven type of machine—is becoming reality, including their potential to solve formerly ungraspable mathematical problems.
…
The experiment described in the paper sampled randomly generated numbers produced through a specialized scenario involving quantum phenomena. The researchers said they determined that their quantum computer beat regular computers at the task, which involved calculating the output of certain specialized circuits.
“While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task,” the researchers said.
American “Economic Refugees” Are Increasingly Retiring Abroad
September 21st, 2019Via: CBS News:
The number of retirees who draw Social Security outside the U.S. jumped 40%, to more than 413,000, between 2007 to 2017, according to the Social Security Administration.
To be sure, that’s a fraction of the nation’s 42 million retirees. But it reflects the financial realities for a growing number of baby boomers who are hitting 65 without enough money stashed away to maintain their standard of living.
…
“Being an economic refugee is going to be more and more popular as things get weirder and more expensive in the U.S.,” Prescher predicted. “You should move abroad because you want to try a foreign culture. The economic benefit is icing on the cake.”
United States Sending Troops to Saudi Arabia
September 20th, 2019Via: Reuters:
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday approved sending American troops to bolster Saudi Arabia’s air and missile defenses after the largest-ever attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities, which Washington has squarely blamed on Iran.
The Pentagon said the deployment would involve a moderate number of troops – not numbering thousands – and would be primarily defensive in nature. It also detailed plans to expedite delivery of military equipment to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
CHP Arrests Man Accused of Posing as Chinese Police Officer in Irvine
September 20th, 2019Are these simply nut jobs, or is the Chinese regime encouraging this to intimidate Chinese people living abroad?
Via: KTLA:
A man driving around Irvine in a mock Chinese police vehicle was arrested, and investigators are working to determine his motive, officials said Wednesday.
Several people reported last Tuesday, Sept. 10, that an Asian man driving an Audi sedan made to look like he was an officer with the Chinese People’s Armed Police, a national paramilitary force, said California Highway Patrol Officer Florentino Olivera.
The vehicle was outfitted with the security force’s seal and Chinese police symbols, photos released by CHP show.
…
Authorities are looking into reports of a second, similar vehicle spotted in Irvine, according to Olivera.
Earlier this summer, officials in Northern California arrested another Asian driver with Chinese markings on their car after the person tried to pull over an off-duty officer, Olivera said.
A series of fake Chinese police vehicle sightings last month in Australia raised concern amid pro-Hong Kong protests, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
But when officials tracked down one of the drivers, he told them he’d bought the decals online and put them on his car as a “joke.” The man did not face consequences, since it’s only a crime to impersonate an Australian law enforcement official in the island nation, according to ABC.
Most Common Antidepressant Barely Helps Improve Depression Symptoms, ‘Shocking’ Trial Finds
September 20th, 2019Via: Telegraph:
The most commonly prescribed antidepressant barely relieves symptoms of modern depression, a major study reveals.
The largest independent investigation ever undertaken found patients taking sertraline experienced negligible improvements in mood.
Published in the Lancet Psychiatry, the study comes amid mounting controversy over increased use of antidepressants by GPs in recent decades, with roughly 7.3 million people in England issued a prescription each year.
Its authors said they were “shocked and surprised” by the results, and called for the development of new classes of medication.
However, in the absence of better drugs, they do not want current prescribing practice to be changed because the trial also showed sertraline is effective in reducing anxiety, which often accompanies depression.
The new trial is by far the largest to be conducted without the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry.
